Introducing Second Nature: Next-level sales coaching via conversational AI
Hi there, 2022! It’s our pleasure to kick off the new year welcoming a new portfolio company to the signals Venture Capital family: Say hello to Second Nature! We’re excited to announce that we led their $12.5M Series A round. Zoom Apps Fund as well as existing investors Cardumen Capital and StageOne Ventures have also joined the round. In the following, we’ll introduce you to Second Nature — our first investment in Israel — and share what makes their AI-powered sales coaching platform stand out.
Sales coaching has become a race against time
Sales is naturally one of the most business-critical functions which is why the issue of optimizing sales operations ranks pretty high on every business owner’s agenda. The task hasn’t become easier in recent years: In today’s accelerated market environment, companies are launching new products and features much more often and faster. What customers love about many SaaS companies — that new product releases are delivered without any down time — makes it challenging for sales reps to stay up to speed with what they’re selling. But it’s not only the shortened training cycles: In a world of home office and remote-first work, it’s clear that sales training must be run digitally. While there are many digital sales enablement tools available, one common challenge remains largely unsolved: How can you create a digital sales training experience that is automated and scalable (doesn’t rely on manual human feedback) but also interactive and realistic?
Well, let us introduce the people who solved this challenge: Ariel Hitron and Alon Shalita, the founders of Second Nature.
Second Nature’s conversational approach: Meet Jenny — your virtual pitch partner
Second Nature brings digital sales coaching to a whole new level by offering an AI-powered virtual conversation partner. Employing state-of-the-art Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and speech recognition technology, the AI — going by the name of Jenny — is able to engage in actual conversations with sales reps, ask smart questions and give feedback in real-time. Whereas other tools rely on one-directional self-recording of sales pitches, Second Nature allows for the simulation of interactive two-way conversations, rendering the training much more immersive and realistic.
As Jenny constantly learns based on the input she gets, sales reps can even train for different types of leads and learn to tailor the messaging according to the target customer, such as which questions to ask, how to respond to customer pushback and concerns, or how to convey the value proposition.
Check YouTube for a demo.
Your companion throughout the whole sales journey: onboarding, training, coaching, certification
Second Nature not only allows for training and coaching of existing sales teams, but also enables the effective onboarding of new colleagues. Customers can feed their company- and product-specific sales playbooks into Second Nature’s model, vastly speeding up the ramp-up phase since no human coaches are required. Any updates, like product features or altered messaging, can be fed into the AI, and updated virtual training can be scaled across sales teams. This scalability is unique across all sales coaching solutions and stands out to us as a clear differentiator.
Covering the whole sales training journey and also allowing the tracking of individual performance, Second Nature saves managers tons of time that they would otherwise be spending on watching hours of recorded pitches, giving individual feedback without really knowing where to focus, or self-recording training videos. Salespeople, for their part, can practice with Jenny whenever and wherever they want, in a safe space for learning, making mistakes and improving.
Why Ariel and Alon are geared for success
Apart from believing in the product and vision, we were also instantly convinced of Ariel’s and Alon’s skills and drive to change the current state of sales coaching. Drawing from their own experience managing sales and engineering teams at major tech companies like Facebook, VMware, and Kaltura, Second Nature’s co-founders know how hard it is to keep sales teams performing at their best. They found the ability to have meaningful, genuine conversations with other people to be the most important skill for sales reps. Lacking a truly effective and suitable tool ticking all the boxes, they decided to build their own. Customers, such as Zoom, SAP, and Check Point, already use Second Nature for their sales teams. And there is much greater potential to be tapped, given that sales forces in many enterprises still largely depend on traditional methods like individual coaching or learning management systems. Second Nature’s self-service and immersive sales simulation software can be the painkiller.
How does this fit into the signals ecosystem?
Here at signals Venture Capital, we believe in startups that aim to fundamentally change the way enterprises interact with their stakeholders and help them to redefine their businesses for the digital age. We’re always looking for exceptional teams with solutions that enable enterprises to empower their workforce. Making sales training highly scalable, Second Nature allows enterprises to keep up with the accelerated market dynamics, perfectly matching our investment focus. We’re convinced that Second Nature will change the status quo of sales coaching and are delighted to be part of their story!
A big thank you to my sVC team mates Lavinia, Merlin and Michael for their help with this post.
